The obvious message? Take that, as if the Sox needed a final slap after blowing a 6-2 lead nine outs away from victory. Whatever stings the Sox might have risked by collectively taking a dip in the new ``Touch Tank" housing 30 cownose rays beyond the right- center-field fence couldn't have been much worse than the marks left by rookie Ben Zobrist's two-run double off Manny Delcarmen in the seventh, home runs by Travis Lee (off Mike Timlin) and Dioner Navarro (off Jonathan Papelbon) that tied the score in the eighth, and Norton's winner off Tavarez, the losing pitcher in three of Boston's five extra-inning defeats this season.
``We didn't finish the game," said Sox manager Terry Francona, forced to play another game of catcher roulette in the absence of the injured Jason Varitek and Doug Mirabelli and getting a collective 0 for 5 from Corky Miller (``Who?" mocked a graphic on the Devil Rays' telecast) and Javy Lopez, as well as a probably inadvisable fastballs-only sequence of pitches from Papelbon, who had retired 25 of the previous 26 batters he'd faced until Navarro pulled an 0- 2 fastball over the right-field fence. ``Obviously, we had a four-run lead and felt pretty good about where we were, [but] it just didn't end the way we wanted it to."
The Sox can only hope that unlike a potentially fatal encounter with the rays of the cownose variety, the pain inflicted by their baseball namesakes is only temporary. But should the Sox fail to qualify to play in October -- they fell two games behind the Yankees in the AL East, their biggest deficit this season, while remaining a half-game behind the White Sox in the wild-card race, losing seven games in 10 meetings under this Teflon roof, two out of three this weekend, may well leave a permanent scar.
